Home Server/NAS

[hmmblah]

This is the original thread about the build:
https://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=81728

It's been mostly great for the last 3 years, but the storage is maxed out. I have some music and movies, but most of the storage is taken up by my Wife's photography business. I did have to switch the board as the ASRock board was having issues. Every ASRock board I've had eventually starts hard locking on me. BIOS updates will fix it for a bit, but eventually it happens again.

Old specs:
Ryzen 3 1300x
8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2400
Corsair CX450 power supply
Gigabyte B450M DS3H
4x WD Red 3TB Drives (Storage RAID 6)
2x 1TB drives (OS RAID 1)
Some no-frills ATI video card
Adaptec 6405 RAID Controller
Icydock 4 bay cage with backplane
CM HAF case
Windows Server 2016

New:
I'm reusing the CPU, RAM, Motherboard, 4x3TB drives, video card, Icydock, and HAF case.
Adding:
4x8TB IronWolf NAS drives
Corsair TX650 power supply
LSI 9207-8i HBA
Intel 80GB SSD
FreeNAS 11.3

Some old pics:

The CX450 power supply only has 6 sata connectors. I had access to a TX650 which has 8 connectors so swapped that out.

I bought this intel 80GB SSD when it released. Paid $300 for it. Should be fine for freenas...or so I thought.

LSI 9207-8i HBA:

Seagate Ironwolf 8TB NAS drive x4:

Mostly finished build pics:

I did run into an issue with the Intel SSD. For some reason it's not detected at all. Not sure if it's dead or if it's something with the onboard SATA controller. Instead, I used a ~500GB NVMe drive I had in storage. Just a little overkill for FreeNAS, but better than being wasted in a drawer I guess.

FreeNAS is installed and working. I had to disable Cool 'n Quiet and C states to get some stability in FreeNAS. Older Ryzen chips have issues with it for some reason. The newer 2000 and 3000 series seem to be fine according to their forums.

 

[hmmblah]

Here are a few screenshots of FreeNAS. It's a pretty straightforward install. The FreeNAS server I have at work is joined to our Windows Domain so it uses the existing accounts in Active Directory. At home though, I made local accounts. I changed the Documents, Pictures etc locations on our Windows 10 PCs to a share on the FreeNAS server so all files are centrally located and backed up nightly. For free software the web interface of FreeNAS is very polished.

FreeNAS organizes storage into Pools. Within the pools are vdevs. Vdevs are basically groupings of drives set up in RaidZ1, RaidZ2, or RaidZ3. The drives in each vdev should be the same size and speed. I made two vdevs; one with the four new 8TB drives, and one with the four old 3TB drives. Both vdevs are in RaidZ2 so it uses two drives for parity. I can lose up to two drives in each vdev without any data loss. The total capacity of the vdevs is added together in the pool so I end up with ~20TB of usable space. After moving all my existing data over, I have about 75% free space in the pool.

I ordered another 16GB of ram for the server so I can run some VMs. I may move my pihole too and I'll set up a CentOS vm that runs a murmur server.

 

[AlienALX]

Dayum that's a lot of storage

 

[hmmblah]

~14TB was my free space, total usable should have been 20TB...fixed that above, oops.

Installed the 16GB additional ram this weekend.

 

[Kleptobot]

I'm interested to know how you have found the experience of moving user directories in windows 10?
I used to do it to avoid eating up extra space on SSDs with documents/downloads/photos etc but always found it would eventually start exhibiting weird behavior.

 

[hmmblah]

I’ve never had a major problem with it. I do it at work too with all my users’ computers. 100+ computers and 125+ user accounts. No user files are on the PCs. That’s using folder redirection in group policy, but same result. The only time there is an issue is when a file server goes down . Some installers won’t run from a network folder for whatever reason so they need to be copied to the c: drive first. I had issues with the Dropbox client too, but I switched to an onprem Nextcloud server instead.

That’s really all I can think of off the top of my head. What kind of issues did you have?